Birdsong For The Curious Naturalist: Your Guide to Listening

By Donald Kroodsma

Birdsong made easy to understand, lavishly illustrated with color photos, and accompanied by more than 700 online recordings

From a leading expert, Birdsong for the Curious Naturalist is a basic, how-to guide that teaches anyone—from beginner to advanced birder—how to listen. In understandable and appealing language, Kroodsma explains why and how birds sing, what various calls mean, and what to listen for from the birds around us. The descriptions are accompanied by color photos of the birds, as well as QR codes that link to an online collection of more than 700 recordings. With these resources, readers are prepared to recognize bird sounds and the birds that make them. Kroodsma encourages readers to find the joy of birdsong and curiosity—to observe, listen intently, be curious, ask questions, and realize that many unanswered questions about birdsong don’t have to rely on scientists for answers but can be answered by any curious naturalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781328919137

Donald Kroodsma

DONALD KROODSMA is a world-renowned authority on birdsong and professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As a research scientist, he published widely on birdsong for more than 50 years. More recently he has authored books that introduce the general public to birdsong: the award-winning The Singing Life of Birds, The Backyard Birdsong Guides, Birdsong by the Seasons, and Listening to a Continent Sing. He lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts.  

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Copyright © 2020 by Donald Kroodsma

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-328-91911-3

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph © Laure Neish/Nature Niche

Author photograph © Janet Grenzke

eISBN 978-1-328-91913-7

v2.0220

for Janet

The bird did fly

Like the wind in the sky.

The bird did sing

With a special type of ring.

—Jon (third grade)

Thank you for teaching me that if I listen,

there is song everywhere.

—Juliet (kindergarten)

Acknowledgments

I am especially indebted to Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., who, during the summer of 1968 at the University of Michigan Bug Camp (Pellston, Michigan), asked me to work off a $100 fellowship by recording some birds; that project changed my life. John Wiens, graduate advisor at Oregon State University from 1968 to 1972, gave me free rein to pursue birdsong, as did Peter Marler from 1972 to 1980 at the Rockefeller University Field Research Center.

For this book, a huge thank you to the photographers for sharing their hard-earned images: Wil Hershberger, Laure Wilson Neish, Marie Read, Robert Royse, Brian Small, and John Van de Graaff. And to the generous recordists for sharing their sounds: Mieko Aoki, Greg Budney, Greg Clark, Lang Elliott, Janet Grenzke, Wil Hershberger, Brad Jackson, Richard (Nels) Nelson, and Charlie Walcott.

Thank you to each Birds of North America author, for freely sharing insights about your species. My guide to the world of birdsong is written not only with my half century of accumulated knowledge, but also with the wisdom of countless others who share my passions.

Thank you to Eldon Greij, for keen advice on bird photos; to Greg Budney, Karl Fitzke, and Bill McQuay, for your technical skills and contagious enthusiasm for the sounds of our natural world; to Sylvia Halkin and Walter Berry, for your steady support; to Lisa Ekus, for sharing your cardinals; to Mark Robbins, for knowing Kansas bird sounds; to David Stewart, for your inspirational introduction to Australian birds; to graduate students at the University of Massachusetts from 1980 to 2003, for your own inspiring love of birdsong and what it’s all about; to Kenda Kroodsma, for your invaluable editorial revisions; and to countless others who have, over the last half century, enhanced my journey with birdsong in so many different ways.

Here’s a huge thank you to Bruce Byers, who began as a graduate student in the 1980s, only to become my go-to colleague for any question about birdsong or science in general. Bruce, you’re tops—the journey would have been far less fun and insightful without you!

Regina Ryan, you are the best agent ever! Thank you.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team: Lisa White, field guide editor par excellence, copyeditor Loma Huh, production editor Beth Burleigh Fuller, designer/compositor Eugenie S. Delaney, and proofreader Fran Pulver. Janet Grenzke studied the entire manuscript, offering insightful suggestions for improvement (she’s always right, I’ve learned). She has been my partner in recording for the past decade, relishing those early mornings, always eager for the next quest. Her fine recordings strengthen the book. Thank you, Janet—for being the queen of logistics, for providing your undying support, for making our book happen.

1. Beginnings

THE MAGIC AND MYSTERY OF BIRDSONG

Birdsong fills our lives with beauty and wonder. The beauty is everywhere and inescapable: a robin caroling after a rain, a thrush fluting in the forest, a wren babbling in the brush, any bird with an unknown name who moves us. Autumn and winter are dreadfully quiet, and we eagerly anticipate the return of spring and song. Singing birds are happy and sing for joy, we want to conclude, but all we can know for sure is our own happiness and joy in hearing them.

And the curious among us wonder, beginning with simple questions that inevitably take us on unanticipated adventures. Just what is a bird? Why does it sing or call? How does it sing, and what does it hear? Where does a bird get its song? Is it inborn or learned? If learned, when and where and from whom does the youngster learn? How do learned songs change from place to place, in the form of dialects? Which birds mimic other species? How many different songs can a bird sing? How do birds go to roost, or awake, or sing so energetically at dawn, or sing through the night? Which birds do what? And in all the listening, what is it about birdsong that we find so beautiful, so musical?

It is the wonder that drives this book, as a quick scan of the Contents will reveal. In the following pages are great joy and happiness, just waiting for you—and adventure, too. Explore the listening projects, and your appreciation and love of birdsong and the natural world will unfurl.

WHERE AND HOW TO LISTEN

Throughout the book, we listen to hundreds of singing and calling birds. You can access the sounds and more information about them in two ways:

As you encounter the numbered recordings in the text of this book, go directly to the website BirdsongForTheCurious.com and find the corresponding numbered recording. The text in the book and on the website will guide you in your listening.

Alternatively, you can go directly to the recordings on the internet by using the QR (Quick-Response) codes provided throughout the book. With a QR code reader (free, available for download to smartphones), simply scan the QR code, and you will be whisked to the appropriate page on the website, where you can play the chosen sound and read all about it. Try that for the QR code to the left and you will find yourself at the home page for this book’s website.

When you listen, for best effect please use headphones. You minimize extraneous noises this way, and it is then just you and the bird singing directly into your ears. The stereo effect of many of the recordings is also better heard with headphones.

Altogether, more than 75 hours of fine listening and exploring await you. I invite you to linger and listen, to enjoy a sage thrasher singing through the night (p. 127), to marvel at the variety of songs a brown thrasher offers over several hours (p. 92), to appreciate the masterful performance of a western meadowlark (Explore 70). I challenge you to listen to this singing planet as you have never listened before. Don’t settle for a few brief sound bites that provide the minimum clues needed to successfully identify a bird to species. No, strive for a deeper understanding of each singing bird, trying to fathom who it is, what’s in its head, why in this moment it is singing the way it is. A singing robin is never just a robin, for example, but an individual expressing his mind, maybe even a thought. So I pause and I listen, often for hours, and sometimes for days to a single bird, out of admiration, respect, and wonder. The depth and range of recordings in this guide provide you with opportunities that you can find nowhere else, and you can choose to explore as deeply as you wish.

Explore ON YOUR OWN

In 77 places throughout the book, after introducing a topic and providing some examples from common birds throughout North America, I invite you to Explore on your own. Although this guide contains a wealth of recorded songs that you can study, there is nothing more satisfying than exploring the natural world firsthand, on your own. The text for 48 of these Explores is provided in the book, and another 29 are on the website (BirdsongForTheCurious.com).

For some of those explorations you do not need to immediately name the bird you are hearing. It is liberating to be free of naming, and exploring a world without labels can be mind expanding. That idea runs counter, of course, to the primary goal of many birders, which is to pin a label on a bird as quickly as possible and with minimal clues (and then move on). I simply suggest that you first try truly listening, and only second consider the name of what you are listening to. To rephrase one of my favorite book titles, I believe that Hearing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears.

For most invitations to Explore, however, finding birds of a particular species is necessary. If you know your birds and where to find them, that’s great; perhaps find someone to share your knowledge and fun with. For others, finding a few common birds might be relatively easy, but finding other species may be more challenging. Fortunately, countless bird enthusiasts will be eager to help you. Find a local bird club or Audubon Society, or visit the website of the American Birding Association (http://www.aba.org/). If you are youngish, you are sure to find inspiration and help from the ABA’s Young Birders program (http://youngbirders.aba.org/). Ask around and you will discover that a thriving community of bird enthusiasts awaits you.

In all of this listening, I encourage you to engage your eyes as well as your ears, because nothing improves one’s hearing more than being able to hear and see a sound simultaneously. I hear with my eyes, I sometimes say to emphasize the point. Once I saw the difference between the songs of an American robin and a scarlet tanager, for example, my ears could never forget. Our eyes are so much better tuned to the world than are our ears, and it is our eyes that can help bring our ears along. A half century ago I began studying sounds with my eyes, but it was a cumbersome, laborious process back then, and it took me about five minutes to print a two-second graph. Now, these graphs (called sonagrams, which I think of as musical scores for birdsong’) scroll by in real time on our computer monitors. I highly recommend that you engage both your ears and your eyes and download Raven Lite, a free program from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (see How to Hear and See Birdsong," p. 178).

One final thought about these Explore sections: Countless ornithologists have already done extensive research on birdsong, but this book does not explicitly reference all their work. Instead, I refer you to the Birds of North America (BNA) series (https://birdsna.org/), which you can subscribe to for pennies a day or access for free at your local library. There you can find all the latest information on every species mentioned in this book, including references that credit the ornithologists who have done the work. Once you begin exploring a given topic, you will inevitably wonder how your effort aligns with that of others, and the BNA is your entry into this literature. See also Chapter 10, Additional Resources (p. 179).

DOING SCIENCE? YES!

Curious naturalists are natural scientists, but then, one might ask, just what is science? Here’s a pretty standard definition: Science is the search for truths about the natural world. That’s rather abstract, so I’m left wondering how to get started finding those truths. One approach is embodied in this simple statement: Science is the art of collecting interesting numbers. I like that, because it describes so well the process of exploring (combined with a healthy dose of inspiration and ingenuity, of course!). Scientists collect numbers and count for all kinds of reasons—to understand how often something happens, to help estimate the probability of an event, or simply to describe what we are seeing or hearing.

Pick any species that intrigues you, or any individual that intrigues you, and count something, anything. The simplest of questions, such as How many songs does he sing in a minute?, inevitably leads to more questions, such as How about the next minute, or another minute at another time of day?, and you will be on your way. How many dees are in the chick-a-dee-dee-dee call? How often does that woodpecker or grouse drum, or the snipe winnow? Draw a graph, showing how the event occurs over time, because seeing patterns in the simplest of graphs leads to even more questions.

Question, then describe and explore as you attempt to find an answer; next, refine the question or ask another, based on your best answer. Some of the best science is done in this simple progression, and so much of what you could learn about birdsong in this way would make you the world expert on your chosen species and question, as so little is known about birds. In the Explore suggestions, I give you a start, but there are limitless opportunities for you to devise your own counting and listening projects.

2. Birds and Their Sounds

BIRDS!

We know a bird when we see one: It has feathers, flies, and maybe sings. We are not likely to confuse birds with frogs and toads (amphibians), lions and mice and us (mammals), or alligators and lizards and dinosaurs (reptiles). But those reptiles deserve a second thought, because scientists have learned that birds descended from dinosaurs. We now actually think of birds as living dinosaurs with feathers. Technically, in the grand classification of animals, birds are considered to be a special, recently evolved group of reptiles.

The 10,500 species of birds in the world are classified by ornithologists into about 40 major groups, or orders. Some of the common groups in North America include the following, arranged in the most recent field guide sequence, from those most recently evolved (passerines) to the oldest groups (ducks and geese; read down each column):

The passerines, relative newcomers to the flock, are extraordinary. They are only one of many orders yet contain most of the species, about 6,200. Of those, about 4,900 are in a remarkable group called oscines, or true songbirds, such as jays and crows, swallows, chickadees, wrens, thrushes, warblers, sparrows, and so many more. These songbirds have brains that guide song learning (see Singing in the Brain, p. 32) and especially intricate voice boxes that enable complex singing (see Not One But Two Voice Boxes, p. 38). The other 1,300 passerine species are called suboscines, or not true songbirds, which in North America are all flycatchers, such as pewees, kingbirds, and phoebes (in Central and South America are several other suboscine groups: woodcreepers, manakins, cotingas, antbirds, and others). Given their abundance and their abundant singing, the passerines, and especially the songbirds, are the primary focus of this book, but many examples will also come from nonpasserines (see Who’s Who?, p. 170).

Some inevitable confusion about terms is worth addressing head-on here. The thousands of true songbirds (oscines) are classified into a single group not because they sing but because of anatomical (e.g., structure of voice box, sperm) and genetic features that they inherited from their common ancestor. These 4,900 (true) songbirds are an evolutionarily cohesive group, and when I use the term songbird, I refer specifically to this special group. But some of these songbirds do not sing, at least in the usual sense (p. 104), and birds in many other groups certainly sing, such as all of the suboscine flycatchers that we know in North America. So not all songbirds sing, and not all singing birds are songbirds!

With the older groups at the bottom, the most recently evolved groups at the top, the arrangement of 12 representative birds on the opposite page implies an evolutionary tree. Birds near the bottom are from more ancient groups that originated before groups above them.

BIRDS SING AND CALL

After a long winter (the Big Silence), our spirits are renewed by the lengthening days and the surge of birdsong in spring. Most often it is the male who rises to the treetops to voice something relatively long and loud and complex, as if he is eager to broadcast his important message far and wide. We hear the beauty and music in his efforts and say he is singing. (As to why he sings, see Why Sing?, p. 26.)

We try to distinguish those songs from calls. Calls are typically shorter sounds that are used in specific contexts by both males and females of all ages. A young bird in the nest calls for its parents to feed it. Always alert, birds call to warn of danger from predators. Foraging birds chatter softly to keep in touch with each other. Songbirds often call high overhead as they migrate during the night. Birds are truly noisy creatures! But a small warning is in order here: ornithologists don’t all agree on what constitutes a song for many species (see examples in the next section, p. 14).

Here are six songbird examples, with male songs and typical calls.

Black-capped Chickadee

SONG: Most black-capped chickadee songs in North America consist of brief, pure whistled notes, hey-sweetie (or fee-bee-ee; mnemonics in italics), the sweetie lower and with a slight waiver midway (♫1). For other versions of the song, see Song (and Call) Dialects, p. 63.

CALLS: Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, the call for which the chickadee is named, is given by both males and females in a variety of circumstances; with predators, the more dee notes, the more dangerous the predator (compare ♫2, ♫3, ♫4). Chickadees have a variety of other calls as well, one of which is called the gargle (♫5).

For more about the black-capped chickadee, see Song (and Call) Dialects (p. 63) and The Music in Birdsong—Pitch-Shifting (p. 155).

White-breasted Nuthatch

SONG: The white-breasted nuthatch’s song is relatively